I sit in an airport, and I watch these people come by, and if I could stand up on this bench and preach to them and tell them about Jesus Christ, I would do it. I know if I stood on this bench and preached to them they would take me out and put me in jail. How do you reach them? These people, these different secular people who see the church and thus God as an enemy.

Preaching: Are there any pastors out there right now in churches that you observe reaching that kind of audience?

Robinson: I think you have the elements in many of the churches like Willow Creek -- they have done well to attract a certain level of non-Christians. Very few of us in our churches reach beyond the circle. There aren't that many churches reaching the Moslems, the Hindus in our culture. I think there are African-American congregations that seem to be making inroads and are doing it with a faithfulness to the gospel and to its preaching.

I think of someone like Tony Evans in Dallas in a large, thriving church in which they don't hedge. The pastor of the largest Methodist church in Houston, Kirbyjon Caldwell, is an evangelical and seems to be doing a better job in reaching the African-American community than we are reaching the Caucasian. But there are a number of thriving churches. Rick Warren has a significant number of people in his congregation who are new to the faith. He is in tune with southern California. It is just what they are doing today. Ten years from now, if they still have the goal of reaching the non-churched person, a lot is going to change then.

It is always easy -- relatively easy -- to reach people provided you don't cross them. So there are churches that are growing that would call themselves evangelical, but there are things that they would not preach because they have said that if they preach that they won't come back. It has been years, years since I have heard a sermon on hell. Because in this culture how do you preach this today, if you are trying to reach out to people. They can't imagine it.

Preaching: A few issues ago we had an interview with Adrian Rogers, and he made reference to that issue. Knowing he is very conservative, people think he would preach frequently on hell, but he doesn't often because it does not make for an effective evangelistic sermon. People do not respond.

Robinson: Several years ago I went through the gospels, and just out of curiosity, I went through the gospel of Matthew and the gospel of Luke. I put a line next to passages. I put a "S" where soft passage was, "H" for hard passage and "I" for in-between. You come to the end of that there are far more hard passages than you are going to have soft passages. Jesus said things that got Him crucified. It is that kind of faithfulness, the desire to be faithful to that, I can't really with integrity pick and choose in the gospel of Luke or Matthew only passages where I think I'll have a soft landing with my audience. On the other hand, it is a reality that if I preach this clearly there are going to be people that are going to respond to me -- and thus to the gospel -- as though this can't be Christian because Christianity is always love and grace. The term bigot is thrown around.